Squared Ring Sirens reported earlier today that the appearance of 28-year Canadian Olympic wrestler Eric Wiebe at the finals of the Mae Young Classic on Tuesday night was no random cameo. The 2016 Olympic Gold Medalist in women’s wrestling in Rio was there as the WWE’s special guest – as she is there for a WWE tryout at the Performance Center all this week.
Wiebe has been a domination on the women’s amateur wrestling circuit, after she won a Bronze Medal at the World University Games in 2013 – although Wiebe is from Ottawa, Ontario, she attended the University of Calgary. In 2014, she represented Canada in the Commonwealth Games, after winning every tournament she was in that year (36 matches in total), before taking the Commonwealth Gold in Glasgow, Scotland. The following year at the Golden Grand Prix Ivan Yarygin, a world championship of sorts for freestyle wrestling in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, she defeated Russia’s own Alena Starodubtsyeva to win the Gold again. She capped off her 3-year reign capturing Olympic Gold from Kazakhstan’s Guzel Manyurova in Brazil in 2016.
“They were there (in Rio) scouting the best athletes in the world,” Wiebe told The National Post in December 2016. “There were so many things happening when I got back from Rio. This was one of the things that was really exciting. I understand the huge cultural (phenomenon) that is the WWE.” When further questioned in another interview, this time with the CBC, if she’d be interested in jumping from amateur Olympic wrestling into pro wrestling she replied, “I’ve always been willing to try and it’s a really interesting offer. They just want me to check it out. The WWE is such a cultural phenomenon and Calgary has such a strong legacy with Stampede Wrestling and the Harts. It’s not something that I’m going to say a hard “no” to but I’m willing to explore.”
Well it appears that the time is now, and Eric Wiebe is at the Performance Center in Orlando, Florida undergoing a tryout as we speak. She spent last year as part of the India Pro Wrestling League, a legitimate pro wrestling league where the team mates actually wrestling Olympic wrestling, but competitively. But it seems that now that she’s dominated every platform she’s tackled, it’s time to make an attempt at a career in sports-entertainment.
The WWE isn’t shy about taking Olympic athletes on their roster – Mad Dog Vachon (Wrestling ’48), The Iron Sheik (Wrestling ’68), Ken Patera (Weightlifting ’72), Bad News Brown (Judo ’76), Giant Silva (Basketball ’88), Mark Henry (Weightlifting ’92, ’96), Kurt Angle (Wrestling ’96), and Chad Gable (Wrestling ’12) are all members of the WWE Universe and were Olympic athletes (Authors of Pain‘s Akim was an Olympic hopeful for Canada in 2016, but chose the WWE instead). But only Kurt Angle won a Gold medal. So not only would Erica Wiebe become only the second Olympic Gold medalist to work for the WWE (assuming the tryout is a success), she would be the WWE’s first women’s Olympic athlete. Another historic milestone for the WWE women’s division.
It's about to get serious. pic.twitter.com/7HmtBsdzyF
— Erica Wiebe (@ericawiebe) September 14, 2017
